Margriet de Moor - The Storm

Snowflakes stuck to her cheeks. The wind sometimes brought moonlight with it, and sometimes icy precipitation. So there she stood on this winter night on a muddy landing stage, a sliver of ground by the Grevelingen, which was an arm of the North Sea piling toward land under the force of tempest and spring tides but held back by five ancient timbers in a fence, and she felt no fear. Of course she saw the danger, she wasn’t crazy, like all the others she could see very well that no power on earth could hold back the biblical flood, but it still seemed a beautiful thing to her that one could have such a close-up view of the situation and know that one had done everything that could be done.

Meantime it escaped no one that Simon Cau was cracking up. When he asked the two workmen what the bürgermeister’s view of things was, his voice was harsh and his face looked furious. The two of them looked back both somberly and obsequiously, and shrugged.

“We couldn’t wake him.”

To which Cau, even more angrily, replied, “Did you hammer on the door?”

They had.

“Yelled? Threw stones at the bedroom window?”

That too. And they’d also telephoned twice, unsuccessfully, from a farmhouse on the Krabbenhoeksweg.

“That’s the limit!”

Very nervous. Was he the only one to understand that they were faced with an enormity? The two men he was addressing nonetheless stayed calm. They simply asked themselves if they shouldn’t be going home. Lidy asked herself nothing. She waited for them to finally set off in the car again. Where to was a mystery, but she’d stopped caring.

Cau was about to say something crude about the bürgermeister when his attention was so distracted that everyone turned round to look. Two girls were pedaling toward them in the darkness from the direction of the village. Silvery blond hair was blowing in every direction from under the caps they wore pulled down tight over their heads. Although the others here had also come the same way, they had pushed their bikes for most of the distance. The girls were lurching along yard by yard and didn’t dismount till they reached the group.

“Horrible weather,” they said breathlessly. “You can barely move.”

It was the Hin sisters, daughters of the tavernkeeper and owner of the gas station, who lived with his family at the three-branched fork in the inner dike that was known as the Gallows. They must have been eighteen or nineteen years old; faces white with cold, they were wearing their nightdresses with a winter coat over the top, and high boots. Their father, they reported, had sent them off with instructions to reach a couple of the outlying houses and tell people they’d be better off coming to the tavern tonight because it was on higher ground. He himself had mounted his motorbike and had gone with his son to the inner lock on the Anna-Sabina polder, where the gate was so rusted after many years that it probably couldn’t be closed, but it was worth a try.

The girls looked away from the circle of faces toward the other side of the open expanse, where somewhere in the darkness was the little house they wanted to make their last call.

“We must get going,” they said.

But Simon Cau was looking in the opposite direction and then back at the dike workers. While the girls were talking about their father and brother — who were certainly trying in vain at this very moment to cope with an immovable piece of scrap metal — Cau must have come to the realization that he had failed to take care of the two inner sluices in his own polder. Both were reasonably well-maintained mechanisms, built of cast iron in a casing of plastered stone. At high tide he usually lowered them, one of the standard measures that nobody ever thought about. The dike-enclosed inner polder didn’t draw its excess water off into the sea but into the ditches of the neighboring Louise polder, which then took it across the Vrouw Jansz polder to the pumping station at the docks for agricultural produce on the Grevelingen. If one closed the sluices of the inner dike at high tide, the polder, should the sea dike give way farther along, would also be protected from direct contact with the sea.

Simon Cau shook his head swiftly several times, like a man trying to stir up something in his memory. In an accusatory way, not making eye contact, he reminded the dike workers about the Dirk sluice and the sluice at Draiideich.

“Get going! Now!”

Yes, chief, and they were already on their way. The two dike workers ran with deliberately long strides, so as not to slip on the muddy ground, toward the tractor, which was still hitched to the cart with the last of the sand. Meanwhile the handful of people who had come out of curiosity started back to the village. “Look at that,” said one of them, pointing to the left side of the dike, apparently feeling that the vision in the moonlight rendered him and all the others now setting off home something close to sleepwalkers. A tongue of foam, followed by a swell of black water, licked over the crown of the dike.

As his companions all moved away, Cau, as if nailed to the spot, stared at the gobs of foam shooting past him. The advance guard of the floodwater was pouring in a glistening stream down over the dike. But surely the water came up over the protective barriers somewhere on this island almost every year? Somewhere this island was always underwater. And it was well known that in 1944, when the Germans, who feared an invasion, left the sluices in the delta open, the land was flooded without raising any surprise. People here were really used to water, but tonight the situation was obviously scaring Simon Cau. As Lidy headed for the car and the Hin sisters began to push their bikes through the sand to the road, Cau hesitated and stood still, leaning against the wind. He moved his lips and made a face, as if he were assessing the massed weight of what was behind the dike and preparing, if possible, to take it on his own head, neck, and shoulders.

She had driven with Cau and the Hin girls to the last address on the pair’s list. She sat in the backseat with one sister, while the other, in front, gave Cau directions. They had come along because Simon Cau, desperate to appear to be in charge at the dock, had ordered them to leave their bikes; they could come back for them tomorrow, he would drive them. They reached the little house. Quick now! Cau kept the engine running. One sister leapt out of the car with Lidy, and both of them ran immediately to the windowpanes, but these were already making such a noise in the wind that their hammering did no good, and everything inside stayed dark. So they went around the house, through the vegetable garden, already underwater, to the back, where they banged on a crooked side door that had a little window at eye level. Meanwhile Cau, waiting on the road, must have felt the pressure of time to be unbearable.

Suddenly the wind was drowned out by the heavy blast of a horn.

Lidy froze. In the pitch dark, without a conscious memory, she was called to order. A signal from home. Loud, long, three notes. The cramp that ran all the way into her fingertips was like an electric shock. For a long moment, shocked awake as if from an anesthetic, she was back in her own life, along with everything that belonged in it, father, mother, sister, husband, child, and then just as swiftly, just as she registered all this, it was gone again. Behind the door a dog had begun to bark.

The little window opened. A vague face had showed itself.

Now they were on their way again, between pollarded willows bent over at odd angles. Lidy’s legs were wet only to the knees; the girl beside her was soaked to the waist. Because the road was underwater, they had failed to notice the hollow filled with spurting water as they raced back to the car. Lidy had suddenly seen the girl sink, and had grabbed for her reflexively. It wasn’t clear why, but the Hin girls were now insisting on taking part in the next stage as well.